Fear and loathing in Houston

In today’s day and age, the ideology that can claim more followers than any other is hatred. Hatred against Muslims, Jews, immigrants, non-Hindus, etc. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in Houston on Sunday where a massive gathering of Indian-Americans had converged to warmly welcome their revered leader. Donald Trump joined him too. I happened to be in Houston. Hypocrisy was on full display. The Indian diaspora proved that racism, bigotry, intolerance, and state terrorism are fine.

Immigrants in America always support and advocate for diversity, tolerance, strenuous rejection of “otherness”, and secularism. Because they are the very stakeholders in this. It is the immigrants in any society, especially American, who are at the receiving end of racism. Immigrants bring with them their peculiar lifestyle, including religion. Most importantly, the Indian diaspora in America supports freedom of speech, religion, and other such awesome rights. However, in a perfect case of sheer hypocrisy, the same is not advocated for in their home country or in the now India-annexed Jammu and Kashmir. Even the Indian-American comedian, Hasan Minhaj, wasn’t allowed to enter the NRG Stadium because of his critique of Modi in the past.

Modi was labelled the “Butcher of Gujarat” for his direct role in killing over a thousand Muslims in the province where he was the chief minister. He was banned from entering the US for that worst form of state terrorism. He annexed Kashmir on August 5 — which has been under lockdown since — converting it into something worse than an open-air prison, which was its status pre-August 5. The Indian diaspora in America generally, and in Houston specifically, have shown that the saffron scarf-wearing Hindutva extremists are not confined to India.

While in America, they advocate tolerance, diversity, and other such acceptable norms of society. However, for their home country, they support the very racism they demand an escape from in America. They are aggrieved when the redneck Aryan White in America hate them and cannot differentiate them from an Arab or Pakistani. But for India, they support the very Nazi-style RSS-driven hatred for non-Hindus.

Kashmiris cannot access medical supplies, kids cannot go to school, people cannot bury their dead, young boys cannot play cricket or football, which was their only escape from the suffocation of the open-air prison. Kashmiris are barred from frequenting large mosques because the Indian government fears large gatherings. The Indian-Americans support the right to freedom of association, but only in America. They support inter-mingling of races in America but not in India, where a lower-caste Dalit can lose his life for riding a horse. These facts cannot be compartmentalised. Modi is supported because he built toilets for hundreds of thousands of Indians, yet staying non-committal over the incarceration of 8 million in Kashmir is textbook hypocrisy. Claiming to support Modi for what he is doing for India, which is a fiction by the way, but ignoring how he rendered almost 2 million residents of Assam stateless, is cherry-picking reasons to rationalise one’s own bigotry.

For the angels of peace, there is a lesson to be learnt in Modi’s speech. Loud cheers from the crowd at the NRG Stadium came when Modi merely hinted at Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism and when Modi said that the time has come for India to fight against these supporters of terror, hinting at Pakistan. The angels of peace should smell the coffee. Many coffee outlets are serving not too far from the UN building in New York. I am a Pakistani-American and I will never apologise for Pakistan and never advocate for peace with a country that never accepted Pakistan’s existence. Let someone else take over who can stand up hard, very hard for Pakistan.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 26^th, 2019.

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